Story mode injects too many cut scenes. Keyboard controls are clunky. Visual settings cannot be adjusted. No online multiplayer, despite being featured in the console releases.

Bottom Line

One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 delivers absurd action and offers hours of replayable content, but drops the ball with its botched PC transition and lack of online multiplayer.

One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 ($49.99) is the latest iteration in the Dynasty Warriors-style One Piece games by developer Omega Force. It marries the unique art style and set pieces of the Shonen Jump manga One Piece with the energetic beat 'em up action that Omega Force is known for. Pirate Warriors 3 is the first game in the series to be ported to PC, and, unfortunately, it doesn't live up to its full potential. Despite Pirate Warriors 3's bombastic action, tremendous replay value, and great visual appeal, the PC version lacks online play, and suffers from sloppy port issues that can hinder your enjoyment of the game. One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 is also available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita.

One Piece of What One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 condenses the One Piece saga, which currently spans over seven hundred manga chapters, into an action-packed, fifteen-hour-long campaign called Legend Mode. It tells the story of a pirate named Monkey D. Luffy, who assembles a ragtag band of golden-hearted pirates and sails in search of the legendary treasure known as One Piece.

Pirate Warriors 3 does some heavy summarization to accommodate said story, but the game is littered with cinematic scenes, manga-style exposition, and volumes of text to read. Do note that all voiced dialogue is in Japanese, with English subtitles. The heavy-handed storytelling can be a boon for players who have fallen off the One Piece wagon, and for PC gamers new to the series, but it is also a hindrance to the gameplay.

Story events are peppered throughout every level, pushing the narrative forward while also stopping the action and killing the pace of a fight. You can skip these scenes with the press of a button, but that doesn't prevent their initial interruptions. These occur in addition to the events that bookend each mission. As a result, playing through Legend Mode feels a bit long-winded. Fortunately, there is an option to auto-skip scenes you've already seen, which makes replaying missions much less bothersome. Each mission has a list of bonus parameters, such as not losing any allies or playing the mission on a harder difficulty.

Making Pirates Walk the Plank Pirate Warriors 3 uses the same combat framework featured in the Dynasty Warriors series, and more recently in Hyrule Warriors. You string together light and heavy attacks to perform a variety of flashy, character-specific combos, which you use to crush waves of dim-witted pirate goons. Each character also has special attacks they can use when their attack gauge is filled. These attacks grant them temporary invincibility and deal heavy damage to the surrounding enemies.

The challenge in these games, Pirate Warriors 3 included, comes not from fighting grunts, but from the bosses and captains that litter the stage. Often times the victory conditions include the safety of your team mates, who get into skirmishes throughout the scenario. This forces you to both manage territory and assist your teammates, giving the game a much more tactical element than your first glance would suggest.

What is unique to Pirate Warriors 3 is the team attack system. As you fight effectively, a synergy gauge, called kizuna, fills up. When filled, your allies pop up to perform a powerful finisher at the end of your combo. You can cycle between allies as well, each with their own kizuna meter to fill. This is useful because the gauge can also be used to activate a temporary enhanced mode called kizuna rush that powers up your attacks and opens up new combos. With three different kizuna gauges to fill, you can strategically choose which one to keep filled for ally assists, and which one to consume for bonus damage.

Though Pirate Warriors 3 shares many features with other Warriors games, it remains engaging throughout the lengthy story campaign. This is largely thanks to the art style of One Piece, which Omega Force has depicted wonderfully through its character models, as well as the action, which does away with pseudo-realistic combos in favor of cartoon silliness and spectacle. Explosive rubber-band punches and spring-loaded boxing gloves, among many other attacks, round out your repertoire.

Taking the Wind out of the Game's Sails The gameplay carries Pirate Warriors 3 almost entirely on its own merit. But like other Koei Tecmo-developed titles ported to PC, Pirate Warriors 3 has its share of problems. The most immediate issue is the sloppy control implementation. Pirate Warriors 3 can only be played with a gamepad, or with a keyboard. There is no mouse support for camera control or inputs of any kind. The keyboard controls are serviceable, sure, but the lack of any mouse support it baffling.

Xbox controllers work well, provided they are official and not third party models. I use a third party controller, and found that I could not map the camera to the right thumbstick, and that the confirm and cancel buttons are permanently mapped to the X and Y buttons, respectively. A glance at the Steam forums reveals that others are having gamepad-related compatibility trouble as well, so consider yourself warned.

Aside from the control problems, the other major issue is the botched visual adjustment settings. At the time of this writing, most of these simply do not work, leaving the game stuck with PlayStation 3-level visuals. Settings like draw distance, texture resolution, texture filtering, and post-processing effects do not change anything in game when tweaked. The bright, cartoony look of Pirate Warriors 3 makes the visual issues somewhat more palatable, but they are there nonetheless.

The game's frame rate is thankfully unaffected, and Pirate Warriors 3 plays at a consistent 60 frames per second. The screen resolution is another feature that can be changed without issue; it ranges from 640 by 480 to 1920 by 1080.

My last point of contention with Pirate Warriors 3 is the lack of online multiplayer modes. My experience with past Warriors titles taught me just how fun the games are when played cooperatively and the absence of this feature is a huge disappointment. Especially since the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 versions of the game boast the feature.

Sailing New Waters Despite One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3's rock-solid gameplay, the PC port suffers from enough niggling issues to warrant a second thought. The aesthetic problems can be overlooked, and the awkward controls can be corrected with a proper gamepad. But the lack of online multiplayer is disappointing no matter how you slice it. Still, if you're looking for a silly action game, One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 is a solid option.

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About the Author

Gabriel Zamora is as passionate about writing as he is about video games and electronics, and his fervor has led to game and tech article contributions in a variety of online publications including PCMag.com, Examiner.com, 2D-X.com, and Multiplayergames.com. When not criticizing the state of gaming or reviewing tech, Gabriel spends much of his time... See Full Bio

One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 (f...

One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 (for PC)

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